The Nothing looked surprised.
“You want something from me?” She was simultaneously taken aback and proud at the thought and immediately reached up an awkward fingerfoot to pluck a feather from her chest. “Here you go! Is one enough? You’re welcome to another one. Or several. I mean…” She sneezed and pooed on the rug. “Whatever you need. I so want to be useful!”
“Thank you,” Aunt Isa said in an unusually soft tone of voice. “One will do. You’re a great help.”
The Nothing looked several inches taller and sneezed happily.
Aunt Isa spat on her forefinger and dipped it in the ashes in the fireplace. Then she carefully drew a cross with four lines exactly the same length and then a large circle around the cross and a tiny circle in the centre. A wheel. A wheel with four spokes that divided it into four quarters. Just like the wheel embossed into the leather of the book. In each of the three quarters now lay the soil, the coal and the feather. She spat again so that the last quarter circle now contained a little bit of water.
“The hub…” she mumbled. “If this is going to work, then…” She looked up at me. I had followed her actions with interest because somehow it was so very unlike Aunt Isa. I had absolutely no doubt that my aunt was a witch, but not that kind of witch – not the sort to draw mysterious patterns on the floor and perform complicated rituals. Her witchery was more natural: seeing a little deeper than anyone else, helping nature along with wildsong and herbs, walking the wildways like animals who appear and disappear without your ever seeing how they do it. More sense and instinct than chants and rituals.
“Clara,” she said. “I’m afraid I have to ask you for a drop of blood.”
“What are you doing?” I said.
“I’m trying to save Vi… Viri… that poor dead woman from oblivion.”
“Viridian.”
“Yes. Her.”
“Can’t you even say her name?”
“Not yet,” Aunt Isa said grimly. “It takes all my concentration just to remember what I’m trying to do.”
“And my blood will help.”
“Yes. It will make the hub of the wheel – its centre. It’s the hub that gathers together the wheel and makes it complete. Do you understand?”
“Sort of.” Though I didn’t really. I mean, I could see that that small circle in the middle of the wheel was its centre, but it was harder to understand why it made all the difference.
“The fulcrum,” Oscar exclaimed. “Can’t you see it, Clara? If it was a real wheel, not just a drawing, then the hub would be the point where the wheel connects to the axle, the point that the whole wheel would revolve around. If a wheel doesn’t have a hub, then it isn’t a wheel at all, just… eh… a circle.”
“OK…” I said slowly. “I guess it kind of makes sense.”
“Of course it does,” Oscar said. “This will be so cool. Come on, Clara, prick your finger or something.”
It was Oscar, naturally, who had once thought it a brilliant idea that we should mix blood. Now he looked at me with the same enthusiasm. It really was a shame that it wasn’t Oscar who had a wildwitch aunt. He would have loved learning all the stuff that terrified me.
No one had a knife or needle. We ended up using a shard of glass from the broken windows to make a small cut in my ring finger. It stung, the cut ended up being deeper than intended, and my finger started to bleed profusely.
“Hold it over the hub,” Aunt Isa said. “And speak Vvv… her name.”
Remember Viridian. If ever a message had been drummed into me, I guess it would be that one.
I knelt down beside the wheel and held my finger over the centre. There was no need to squeeze my fingertip to get the blood out, it flowed all by itself, glossy, dark red drops trickling over my fingertip and nail and dropping, almost in slow motion, I thought, onto the black hub of the ash wheel.
The first drops hit it without making a sound. I stared at the blood that slowly filled the whole of the hub without spilling over the lines, forming a perfect blood-red circle. I totally forgot I was meant to say something as well. It was just like when Lop-Ear accidentally pierced the skin on my neck. A part of me was looking at the blood, but at the same time I was still in the blood, I was both inside myself and outside, but more and more outside with each falling drop.
“Clara! Say it!”
Aunt Isa’s voice sounded strangely distant. The drops kept falling. I fell with them. The wheel started turning around me. I was at the centre. Everything else was spinning. The fulcrum, Oscar had said, and that was exactly what I was. I stood still. Everything else moved faster and faster until blurred by the speed and then I couldn’t see anything. Nothing at all.
CHAPTER 22
“No man, no woman, no child.”
When everything stopped spinning, I was in a different place. There was no longer a drawing room, a fireplace or an Aunt Isa. Instead there was darkness and the smell of seaweed and brine, and a few rays of grey daylight falling vertically from small cracks in the roof. Sand. Rock. A distant sound of lapping waves and wind, and seagulls screeching. Water trickling.
This is a dream, I thought. This can’t be real.
But it felt incredibly real. I was dizzy. My finger was bleeding. And when I took a wobbly step forwards, everything whirled for a final time, and I had to sit down so as not to fall. The sand was wet under my bottom, and the dampness quickly seeped through my leggings.
There was a sneeze and a farting sound, and someone said:
“I’b so bery, bery sorry.”
The Nothing was sitting on her feathered backside with her tail feathers spread in the sand not far from me.
“I didn’t mean to,” she said. “Only it’s so difficult not to follow someone. I try and I try, but…”
“It’s OK,” I whispered hoarsely. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“You are?” she said, and looked completely taken aback.
“Yes.” And it was the truth, because her presence made me feel a little less crazy. This had to be real, I hadn’t lost my mind and it wasn’t a dream. If it had been a dream, I most certainly wouldn’t have brought The Nothing along…
The wheel ritual must have gone wrong somehow. Or turned out differently from what Aunt Isa had expected. And here we were, sitting next to each other, The Nothing and I, in an underground cave by the sea.
“Do you think this is the cave that Viridian woman was talking about?” The Nothing asked.
“Yes,” I said, because the same thought had crossed my mind. “I don’t know why or how we ended up here, but…” Then something else occurred to me.
“Please would you say that again?”
“What?” The Nothing sniffed.
“The name.”
“The name?”
“Of the woman from the book,” I said patiently.
“Viridian?”
“Yes. You can say it.”
“Eh… Yes.”
Now that was weird. Shanaia hadn’t been able to say it, nor had Aunt Isa, not even Cat could get it out in full no matter how hard he tried. REM EMBERVIR IDI AN and all that. But The Nothing could.
“How is that possible?” I peered closely at the small, snotty-nosed, feathered creature with the constantly weeping eyes. “How can you do that, when nobody else can?” Apart from me, and Chimera, that is, but she didn’t count.
“Because I’m The Nothing,” she said woefully.
“What do you mean?”
“‘No man, no woman, no child. No animal. No thing will remember you’,” she quoted. “That was the curse. And I’m the Nothing. So I remember. At least some of it. That’s why she could use me in the beginning.”
“Use you for what?”
“I could see that it said something in the books. But I hadn’t learned to read, not to begin with. And when she started teaching me, then… I became a little less Nothing. I became able to do something. I became someone. And then… Then the words faded for me. I mean the words she had wr
itten. Viridian. And then I was useless again.”
“True,” said a voice in the darkness. “You’ve always been a complete failure in every possible way.”
The Nothing’s face changed. Her eyes lit up. Her mouth twisted into a blissful smile.
“Mum!!” She squealed ecstatically, and started hopping and flapping across the sand towards Chimera.
CHAPTER 23
Blood Arts
There was barely enough room for her. She held her wings awkwardly, half-folded, and for the first time I wondered what it was like to have them, to live with them every day. Being able to fly would be wonderful, of course, but if the price was that you couldn’t get into any place with a ceiling less than four metres high… I’d never thought about that part of it before.
I don’t know why I was thinking about it now. Perhaps it was simply to be able to think anything at all, rather than just stare at her in mute panic. My heart was pounding so loud that my ears were popping, and I leapt to my feet so that at least I would be standing when she… when she…
Well, what did I think she was going to do? She’d hunted me for months and made herself an outcast in the wildworld, but I still didn’t know what she wanted from me.
Her yellow, predatory eyes rested on me.
“Witch child,” she said. “You came. I knew that even Isa Two-Shoes wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation.”
“Temptation?” I croaked. “What temptation?”
“To lift the curse. But your witch aunt doesn’t understand the blood arts as well as she thinks she does.”
Blood arts. No one had ever really told me what the term meant, and yet I understood. Something inside me recognized it and knew that it was what happened to me when my blood mixed with something else. It was why I sometimes knew what Oscar was doing even when I wasn’t with him. It was the reason I could “talk” to Cat – since that first morning in the stairwell when he had clawed me between the eyes, from the moment he had licked up my blood, we’d been bound to each other. It was blood arts that had freed Lop-Ear from enslavement, and it was blood arts that had brought me into this cave.
Chimera’s wings suddenly swept forwards, and I was knocked over. She kept flapping her wings, long, quick, swishing strokes that raised the sand into the air and whirled it around. I had to narrow my eyes to keep it out, it clogged up my nose and crunched between my teeth, I was caught in the middle of a raging sandstorm and I had to spit and spit, half blind and half deaf from the hissing sand and the rush of her wings.
I tried to get up, but a swift wing stroke knocked me back down. I couldn’t stand, I couldn’t even sit, only lie gasping and dazed in the gritty sand until the storm finally settled around me. It felt a bit as if she’d whacked me in the back of the head with a golf club, but as it turned out, she hadn’t just used her wings because she wanted to knock me to the ground.
She had swept away most of the sand from the floor of the cave. Under the sand the ground was completely level and glassy. “… as clear as quartz or glass,” Viridian had written in her book, and although the rasping of sand through the centuries had made it less distinct, I could still see the outline of a large crossed wheel, almost identical to the one Aunt Isa had marked out in the drawing room, only ten or twenty times bigger. And I was lying almost exactly in the middle. Somehow that felt ominous, and I tried to crawl away, but my arms and legs wouldn’t cooperate.
“Earth,” Chimera called out in a voice that grated like metal against rock. From the darkness around us emerged a… a mole? It was one of the biggest I’d ever seen. Or perhaps it only looked bigger because I was lying on the floor. Its pink snout twitched as it crept forwards, its shovel-like front paws slipping clumsily on the smooth floor. This place wasn’t right for it. But Chimera gave it no choice. She pointed a long taloned finger at one quarter of the circle, and the mole scrabbled across the floor until it reached the spot she had pointed at. I could see its flanks move in shuddering breaths, and I thought I could sense its fear. It didn’t want to be here. This wasn’t where it belonged. It wanted to go back to its underground tunnels, to wet soil and the smell of worms, to moist leaves and crunchy beetles and grass roots that lit up the darkness with their juicy scent.
“Water!” Chimera’s second command made me jump as if she were summoning me. But she wasn’t. It was another creature forcing itself, or being forced, across the floor of the cave, from the corner where the smell of the sea and the cries of seagulls were strongest. A small grey speckled seal, with eyes that reminded me of Woofer’s brown labrador gaze. It didn’t want to be here either. It let out a tiny hiss of resistance, but Chimera’s imperious finger silenced its protests, and it shuffled on its belly across the sandy floor until it was lying in its own quarter circle, next to the earth zone where the mole was.
“Air!”
“Take me, take me!” The Nothing cried, jumping into the air as high as she could. “I have feathers! I can be useful!”
Chimera’s concentration wavered.
“You’re nothing,” she hissed. “Go away before you ruin everything.”
The Nothing sneezed and pooed on the floor, of course.
“Useless freak,” Chimera snarled and swept The Nothing aside with a stroke of her wing. “Go and die some other place!”
“I’b so sorry,” The Nothing whimpered, her tearful distress clogging her sinuses even worse than usual. “I’b tried. I really hab! But it’s actually bery difficult not to live once you’b started!”
The Nothing flapped her wings frantically and managed to raise herself perhaps two or three feet above the sand in the cave, and so almost collided with a large grey bird that came sweeping in from the same direction as the seal. It wasn’t a seagull, but a greylag goose, with a glossy scarlet beak and broad black bars across its chest and neck. It swerved to one side to avoid the collision and landed awkwardly with flapping wings on the smooth cave floor. It honked in protest, and I thought it sounded a little like a small car beeping its horn at a truck, but when Chimera held up her clawed hand and crooked it, the goose stopped squawking immediately. It slumped down on its chest as if its legs could no longer carry it, and the flapping wings grew still.
“Fire,” Chimera commanded next.
This time it took longer for something to emerge from the darkness. But finally I could hear the scuffle of claws against the bedrock, and a small, portly, spiky lizard crawled reluctantly into the circle. I recognized it immediately – it was a fire lizard like the ones I’d met last autumn at the third part of my witch trial. Being a cave-dweller, it wasn’t quite as out of place as the other three, but even so it wasn’t comfortable – it would have preferred to return to the darkness, it felt unsafe and exposed in the daylight streaming through the cracks in the rock above us, and it was scared of Chimera, though it obeyed her.
Chimera bent over the mole and seized it with one taloned hand. So swiftly that my mind refused to take it in, she sliced a claw across its throat. The mole gasped as if struggling for air, but instead blood gushed out both through its mouth and through the gaping wound below, soaking its black fur. She dropped the small, bleeding body into the middle of its quarter, and then, with a single surge of her wings, landed right behind the seal.
“No!” I cried out, or at least I tried to; my vision was still swimming from the whack that had knocked me off my feet, and my voice sounded even smaller and feebler than usual. Chimera was going to kill those animals! That was what she meant by blood arts, she meant to use their blood, she meant to…
She meant to use my blood.
I didn’t even know what she wanted to use it for, but right now I didn’t care.
“CAT,” I screamed, both out loud and inside my mind with all my strength. “Now.”
That now contained a multitude of meanings it would have taken me several minutes to explain – that he had to come, that we would have to fight together harder than we’d ever fought before, that this was it, and that I was ready, th
at it was now or never.
He didn’t come. It was exactly like the time with the wild dogs, I called for help, but he didn’t come, he’d abandoned me, he’d…
It was exactly like the time with the wild dogs.
Everything inside my mind went very quiet, like a film playing in slow motion with no sound. Yet again I watched as the jaws of Lop-Ear closed around my chin and my throat, I saw her teeth slip, pierce my skin, felt the blood move from me to her. My blood. The blood of Viridian.
“Remember Viridian,” I whispered.
CHAPTER 24
Life Stealer
Blessed Powers. The girl is still wet behind the ears. And completely untrained!
I looked down at my body and it was like seeing myself through the eyes of a stranger. Eyes that viewed me as a child, unfinished and weak, almost as useless as The Nothing.
She hasn’t even grown breasts yet!
I wouldn’t have thought it possible to blush and get embarrassed while I was in mortal danger, but I did. I instinctively raised my arms and folded them across my chest.
Stand up, girl! The new, bossy voice in my head ordered me. Up-up-up!
Suddenly I was back on my feet. Chimera, who had been bending over the seal in the wheel’s water zone, straightened up immediately. She half-turned and stretched one wing in my direction, probably to knock me to the ground again.
Revulsion surged in me like a black wave.
Blood thief, the voice inside me hissed. Life stealer!